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September 2017

09/26/2017

A strong work ethics builds confidence that employees will do what it takes to complete assigned tasks in a timely manner. It illustrates a dedication to one’s employer and its goals, a commitment to organizational values, and a determination to get things done and get it done rightly. A strong work ethic creates an environment of dependability and accountability.

How can an organization foster a strong work ethic? Integrity is the key. Top management must walk the talk of ethics. They must create a culture that supports ethical behavior and responds to improper behavior through sanctions that are consistently applied. The message must be sent that those who violate organization norms will be held accountable. In the end, ethical leaders have a moral compass that faces due North.

Here are a few things you can do to build a strong work ethic in your employees.

Create a supportive environment. Employees want to know that their boss will support them as long as they play by the rules and do whatever it takes to get the job done in an efficient and effective manner.

Provide feedback in a helpful manner. Nobody wants to be torn apart in a performance evaluation. Employees expect to have a critical evaluation but one that makes constructive suggestions to improve performance.

Ask for their advice. Employees know better than anyone else how to fix problems and can help to improve communication between managers and employees; this can lead to increased productivity.

Create opportunities for moving up the ladder. Few employees want to stay at the same position for a long time especially if their performance justifies a promotion. Passing over employees without good reason may lead to a lack of trust and negatively affect work ethics.

Recognize the importance of a work-life balance. Young adults and millennials seek a work-life balance. Work-life balance is a concept including proper prioritizing between "work" (career and ambition) and "lifestyle" (health, pleasure, leisure, family and spiritual development/meditation).

Enable employees to capitalize on their knowledge of social media. Employees, today, know more about how an organization can capitalize on its social media presence to build customer relationships and enhance its image than ever before. Use that knowledge to your advantage.

Treat employees with kindness and compassion. Employees are human beings and should be treated as such. From time to time they may need a day off for personal reasons or time away from the job. A trusting relationship with emotional support builds loyalty and enhances the work ethic.

A strong work ethic supports the employer-employee relationship and also builds confidence that an employee who works hard will be rewarded accordingly. Proper recognition for one’s efforts builds on the work ethic and employees feel valued by their employer. Building loyalty is a process that creates dividends for an organization and can create an ethical organization culture.

My advice is for an employer/manager to think back when they were first starting out and what they expected in their first job. What made them want to stay with that employer and build a lasting relationship? The odds are most of the same values exist today albeit in a slightly different form because of the work-life balance and the omnipresence of social media.

Blog posted on September 26 2017 by Steven Mintz, aka Ethics Sage. Dr. Mintz is Professor Emeritus, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Check out his Ethics Sage blog. I've also just began a Higher Ed Ethics Watch blog. Check out my website,where you can sign up for my Newsletter. Like my Facebook page and follow me on Twitter.

09/15/2017

This blog was first posted in February 2016, but takes on a new meaning given the increasing use of social media in the workplace and need for companies to set limits for employee use. The blog has been updated to reference best practices for social media use in the workplace.

How are we to judge whether a company’s use of social media in monitoring employee behavior is ethical or not? With all the benefits that social media is bringing to the corporate world, a company faces numerous risks in its use, from misuse of company resources, to conflicts of interest and disparagement of others. Social media is a challenging topic because it crosses over so many ethics and compliance issues.

When not diligently managed, social media opens the door to numerous risks – breach of confidentiality, conflicts of interest, misuse of company resources, to name a few of the more obvious ones. Since social media can touch so many aspects of a company’s operations, its leadership needs to address it in context to its overall business operations. Unlike some risk areas, it cannot be successfully addressed largely as a stand-alone matter.

A company without an initiative to effectively identify, assess and manage its approach to social media and its various tools not only loses out on its many opportunities they offer but faces numerous risks to and improper business practices and activities that may damage the business. A program to harness these risks does not need to be onerous or intrusive, but it does need to be proportional to the company’s exposure. Further, a company should expect the social media arena to continue to change both in technologies, their uses, business providers and ways social media impacts the business landscape.

Corporate Compliance Insights out that a variety of possible forms of social media exist, which are worth monitoring and setting ethical standards.

Communication, such as blogs, micro-blogs, social networking and events.

Entertainment, for example, media platforms, virtual worlds and game sharing.

Companies need to understand the application of legal and regulatory standards to social media. Currently, a number of U.S. laws and regulations are being applied to the media’s applications. Regulation FD responds to the communication of company financial or other key operational information outside of the company. Employee privacy is covered by HIPAA. Intellectual property laws address how employees may communicate a company’s IP across social media. FINRA, the securities self-regulatory organization, recently adopted a regulatory notice on use of blogs and social networking sites. But companies should expect the legal and regulatory environment to continue to broaden around social media as its impact on the business world becomes better understood.

"Each company needs to consider three ways in which social media can impact it. First, it needs to address how employees use social media for their personal, non-company use. Second, it should consider how it and its employees use social media for the company’s business objectives. Another issue of social media involves where a company needs to set rights and responsibilities for the non-employees it invites to engage in its social media activities."

Balancing the legitimate interests of employers and employees and job applicants, as well as drawing the proper ethical boundary between moral and immoral conduct regarding social media use is a very difficult undertaking. Employers have legitimate business interests to manage their companies; and employees have legitimate interests to have private off-duty activities. For the employer, hiring people and keeping qualified employees who obey the employer’s legitimate social media policies certainly can be said to advance the self-interest of the employer, which would make the practice moral pursuant to Ethical Egoism. Not hiring people or discharging employees who violate proper company policies and harm the company surely can be construed as a societal norm, which would make the practice moral pursuant to Ethical Relativism.

Furthermore, an argument can be made that legitimate and fair employer social media policies and practices achieve more good consequences than bad, which would make social media-based job determinations moral pursuant to Utilitarianism. Finally, for Kantian ethics, there quite rightly are concerns that an employer’s intruding into an employee’s or applicant’s personal life, as reflected on social media, could impinge on the employee’s freedom, privacy, and dignity and thus be immoral.

A useful resource is a document by Tim Fox, the Compliance Evangelist that provides best practices for social media use in the workplace. Briefly, Fox recommends the following.

Let Your Employees Know What You Stand For.

Celebrate Their Efforts.

Give Your Employees a Tool Kit for Compliance.

In my ethics training programs, I have found that most companies have not established adequate ethical standards for social media use, and company policies have not quite caught up with the changing technology and more prevalent use of social media by employees. Encouraging employee use of social media in the workplace can be a good recruiting tool as so many devote a substantial amount of their daily time to various forms of the activity.

Blog posted by Steven Mintz, aka Ethics Sage, on September 15, 2017. Dr. Mintz is Professor Emeritus at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He also blogs at: www.ethicssage.com. Visit his website for more information about his activities and availability for speaking engagements, ethics training, litigation consulting and expert witness work. "Like" his Facebook page. Follow him on Twitter.

09/12/2017

You know how it starts. You tell a lie and then feel pressured to continue down that road to defend your statement or decision even though you know in your gut the initial decision was wrong. Maybe you shade the truth to prevent an improper action from becoming public knowledge. Maybe you cover it up. After all, you don’t want others to find out.

What’s happened here is you took the wrong turn and have begun the slide down the proverbial “ethical slippery slope.” The initial decision leads to another and then another, all to prevent others from discovering the truth about your decision. In fact, you are embarrassed about it but don’t know to extricate yourself from the situation.

So, what causes a person to take the first step down the ethical slippery slope? The primary reason is not that the decision-maker is a bad person rather that pressures in the workplace can create a workplace environment that leads an otherwise good person to commit a wrongful action or stay silent when others do the same thing.

I have found in my own research and in conducting workshops that an underlying cause for taking the first step down the ethical slippery slope is not knowing what it means to be a truthful person. I think of it in two ways.

Honesty. Expressing the truth (facts) as best we know it and not conveying it in a way likely to mislead or deceive. Honesty in conduct is playing by the rules, without stealing, cheating, fraud and other trickery. The trait of honesty has been valued for centuries, and Shakespeare once wrote, “Honesty is the best policy. If I lose mine honor, I lose myself.”

Full Disclosure. To be honest in your words and actions. To be a truthful person means more than just being honest and not lying. Truthfulness has two components: a lie by commission where you knowingly commit a falsehood, and a lie by omission where you knowingly omit some item of information that another party has a right to know. We can look at full disclosure as an integral part of transparency.

There are many well-known examples of the ethical slippery slope from Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme to Lance Armstrong’s lying about taking performance enhancing drugs. Instances of the ethical slippery slope in organizations occur from time to time as well.

Imagine that one of your workers reports alleged sexual harassment. As the Director of Human Resources, it is your job to decide what to do. You don’t want to tarnish the image of your organization so you dismiss the employee’s concerns. Later, another incident occurs and the employee comes to you again. At this point, many in the organization know of the allegations and the employee has been treated differently, including being harassed and assigned work projects beneath their capability.

The employee decides to file a complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in your state. The agency begins an investigation and questions you about the allegations. Since you did not record or otherwise document the facts of the first meeting with the employee, you answer by saying “there was a complaint.” OSHA found there were two complaints because the employee produced an email sent to you to request the first meeting. You responded by providing the place and time to meet. The employee also produces a second email with the subject header “Following-up on My Complaint.” Now you’ve gone and done it by being untruthful. What will you do next?

I have found that the underlying cause of instances like this one is the lack of an ethical organization culture. If workers perceive that managers cover-up bad decisions, they learn it is acceptable for them to do so as well. A company philosophy of “This is the way things are done around here” pollutes the environment.

In discussing how to establish an ethical environment in an organization, Darnell Lattal, CEO and president of Aubrey Daniels International, behavioral science expert, and author of Ethics at Work, says: “Ethical companies use distinct practices to create an environment in which their employees choose to act ethically, including open dialogue, celebrations, and visible recognition of and rewards for appropriate behavior.”

Listen to your instincts: Don't disregard that disquieting feeling when something doesn't feel right or your being asked to do something that makes you uncomfortable.

Look for backup: Approach others in the organization that you believe have a good 'moral compass' whose values will stand strong in the face of bad behavior.

Collect Information: Gather information to support your own behavior and make it clear that even though an action may be acceptable in the organization you will not act in the same way.

It's never too late to pull back:While it is challenging to reverse course on the ethical slippery slope, one can change behavior once the moral issues have been identified and risks of certain behaviors are considered.

It’s been said that ethics is easier said than done. Ethics is all about what we do when no one is watching. The HR Director figured no one would know about the first complaint.

My advice is to establish an ethical tone at the very top that permeates the organization supported by clear policies and consequences for not adhering to the ethics code. It starts with the board of directors or board of trustees and filters down to the CEO and other top company officials. There also needs to be ethics training so all in the organization know how the ethics code applies to them: What are the organization’s expectations? How should they report wrongdoing? How does adherence to the code and company policies influence performance evaluation?

Blog posted by Steven Mintz, aka Ethics Sage, on September 12, 2017. Steve is Professor Emeritus from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. To learn more about Steve, visit his website.

Follow Steve on Twitter. Like his Facebook page. Communicate with Steve at: steve@ethicssage.com.

09/06/2017

From time to time I post a guest blog to inform my readers of important developments in the workplace. Today’s blog is an important one because the workplace environment can be a pleasing place or one that is unsatisfying depending on the way bosses treat their employees. Workers might feel valued or worthless depending on the tone set by the boss. Dr. Michelle Joy and Dr. Jody Foster share their views by examining the behavior of female bosses.

A bad boss can make the workplace miserable. And sometimes this person is a woman. Given how much time people spend in this office, life itself can become wretched. You start to feel angry, humiliated, anxious, and depressed. You tell your coworkers just how bad this supervisor is, how she treats you, how she makes you feel. She really is a “jerk,” you claim, “a b**ch” you all agree. You consider doing something about it but take no steps. You hope that she stops acting this way and that everything can just get better on its own.

But of course she doesn’t stop. She keeps yelling at you, keeping you late, making you redo reports. She criticizes your work. She criticizes you. You start to realize change is unlikely. You try to do everything you can do to avoid a blowout, but nothing works. Your job becomes a prison where each day is spent thinking about how much you hate your boss – feeling terrible and without any results. Dreading each interaction…

There are two steps on the path forward. Both may seem difficult but are surprisingly simple:

1. Acknowledge what you might be bringing to the table and why your boss’ behavior bothers you so much. Because even if you have found solace in group gossip about your manager, chances are there are some reasons why you are so personally frustrated by this person. Does she remind you of someone else in life? Can you absolutely not tolerate criticism? What is it about you that makes her seem so bad? As intolerable as she seems, and as little as you want to do this, you may be surprised at what answers arise.

2. Empathize. The complementary approach – one that can be incredibly hard to come to terms with – is to empathize with your boss. Why on earth would we suggest finding an empathic spot for this person when it’s quite literally the last thing you want to do? Because if you must find a way to get along, you’ll need to take the long view and try to understand why she acts in this particular way. In allowing yourself to empathize with your boss, you also give space for some of the negativity to fade away. In understanding her and yourself, a desire to learn and to grow can start to replace the bottled-up disdain spilling into every part of your day.

We’ve consulted with a number of employees over the years who have had significant problems working for female bosses. Most were women, though some were also men. In all situations, we asked the workers to ask why they seemed to be so rattled by women in positions of authority. Why do they feel so minimized and humiliated when, for example, they were scolded or criticized? These are all issues that an employee brings to the table and must evaluate. Perhaps the same boss wouldn’t bother another colleague quite as much. We try to help people understand that it’s their responsibilities to look inward for answers to these questions.

At the same time, consulting employees often find themselves wondering whether the women who achieve high rank are in some way meaner or more difficult. And why they would act this way toward them when, as fellow women, they should presumably want to support one another. So we ask them to empathize and think about what be driving her boss to be so dismissive of her feelings. What does she know about her? What is the office like for her boss? What was her path to promotion? What in this story might have caused her to behave so distastefully? Most importantly, we try to frame what internal struggles the boss might be dealing with that cause her behavior.

Perhaps a micromanaging boss is so incredibly afraid of losing control that she needs to discipline everyone around her to feel more secure. Maybe her whole life has spent trying to be “perfect” in order to please others and she takes these insecurities out on those around her. Perhaps a seemingly arrogant boss only flies off the handle when she herself feels exposed or humiliated. She is afraid the world might discover that her big job is just a mask covering her cripplingly low self-esteem, and she constantly fears discovery of what she feels is her fraudulent, inadequate self.

In trying to understand the boss’s underlying anxiety, an employee can interact in ways that help keep the supervisor’s fear at bay:

Find little ways to show the boss she’s in control if she needs to be.

If the boss has fragile self-esteem, show her value by acknowledging her positives when opportunities arise.

If a disorganized boss can’t finish anything and slows everyone else down, learn to interact with her in bite-sized tasks and complete them one at a time.

The hardest part is acknowledging our own roles – and capabilities – in making the workplace more comfortable. In accepting the task of learning about ourselves and our bosses, we can do just that. People want to tell you about themselves and will do so all the time; they want to be heard. Just look and listen with the intent to understand. It works every time.

Dr. Michelle Joy and Dr. Jody Foster are the authors of The Schmuck in My Office: How to Deal Effectively with Difficult People at Work. For more information, please visit, www.schmuckinmyoffice.com.